QUITE contrary to the sweeping claim on the jacket of this book, Mr. Edwin C. Hill is not the inaugurator of a "new profession, that of the journalist historian". To the readers of "Our Times", of "Only Yesterday", of "Interpretations" any such assertion appears stupidly absurd. Before the appearance of "The American Scene" Mr. Hill was merely one of a number of pleasant voices and nimble wits which took advantage of the fact that there is small room for adjectives in the hasty columns of a metropolitan newspaper, that John Citizen is content to allow others to do his reading, thinking, and imagining for him, and that the radio offers a lucrative medium to pleasant voices and nimble wits. In turning to the sterner requirements of print, Mr. Hill seeks entrance into an able company. If one is averagely sentimental about public personalities and if one adopts a tolerant view of the author's self imposed restrictions, he is likely to grant admission.

"The American Scene" is the headline story of 1932. No attempt is made to plunge beyond or to deny superficiality. Mr. Hill plies with nimble grace about prominent folk, furbishing dull news monotones with sprightly adjectives and keen imaginative sense as to detail. Herbert Clark Hoover who found that there was "something wrong with the blueprints", Franklin Delano Roosevelt who would "rather walk than be president", "Humpty-Dumpty" Ivar Krauger of the "great fall", "Playboy" Jimmy of the "Primrose Path", Smith Reynolds "who had never quite got a grip on life", Dr. Rosenbach whose "little gold pencil flipped up" -- all these and a hundred more slide into memory and out again with epigrammatic case. There is nothing new or startling or illuminating; but through all the superficiality there is a sure touch, here flippancy, here sober sentimentality. Mr. Hill, if nothing else, is a good reporter.

The one glaring failure of this book, as is the case with so many of its kind, is the facility with which Mr. Hill relegates the movies, the stage, the radio, the opera, the fine arts, literature, and scientific advancements into a very hasty and carefully indefinite eighty pages. A book which depends for its very life on the value of incident can ill afford, for example, to devote only eight pages to the theater. The result is poignantly similar to the nightmare of a dramatic editor.

But in an election year one must discount the omniverous shadow of the ballot box; and in a depression year, one must discount the tragic little concluding sermon on materialism. To the man who was too busy or too lazy to follow the newspapers in 1932, "The American Scene" will appear trenchant and indispensable. The well informed man will find in it perhaps three hours of pleasant reminiscence and then recommend it for the attention of the neighborhood high school teacher of current events.